Idag finns det mycket forskning om ledarskap. Det finns även forskning om orten Gnosjö och deras så kallade Gnosjöanda som det pratas om ur ett entreprenöriellt perspektiv. Vi upplever däremot att det finns begränsat med studier om ledarskap i Gnosjö. I denna studie ville vi därför studera ledarskapet i Gnosjö. Genom att intervjua tre VD:ar på tre olika familjeföretag i Gnosjö har vi studerat deras föreställningar om ledarskap och hur de har framkommit. Med tanke på att Gnosjöandan har blivit lite av ett kännetecken för Gnosjö ställde vi oss frågan om den har bidragit till VD:arnas föreställningar om ledarskap. Med hjälp av teorin sensemaking ville vi kunna förklara föreställningarna VD:arna har om ledarskap och vad som ligger bakom att VD:arna har dem.  Vad vi bland annat har sett genom våra intervjuer med VD:arna är att deras tidigare erfarenheter och sociala interaktioner har påverkat dem i vilka föreställningar de har om ledarskap. Vi har även noterat att VD:arnas föreställningar är djupt rotade av den historia Gnosjö har.

Forskning visar att ledarskap är ett omtvistat begrepp med ett flertal definitioner som än idag inte har en allmän definition. Detta medför att vi väljer att presentera ledarskap ur olika ansatser för att få en ökad förståelse till varför det tolkas olika. Vidare är även E-ledarskap ett väl utforskat område och i takt med digitaliseringen har dess relevans ökat. Det var just E-ledarskapet som fångade vårt intresse, och i samband med att det har blivit ett verktyg för många företag under den rådande pandemin. Den nuvarande foskningen om E-ledarskap ger främst upplysning till organisationer där detta har varit ett eget medvetet val. Vi anser att det saknas en större utsträckning av foskning om organisationer som tvingas övergå till E-ledarskap till följd av externa faktorer, som i detta fall en pågående pandemi. Således grundar sig vårt syfte i att skapa en ökad förståelse för hur ledarskapet ter sig när en organisation övergår till distansarbete. Därefter vill vi även framföra hur de som utövar ledarskapet skapar mening kring organisationen och om detta i sin tur har ett samband med förändringen. Under arbetets gång har vi kommit fram till att kommunikation och kultur oundvikliga ämnen i samband med ledarskap och därmed något som kräver ett erkännande i vår studie.

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The ongoing pandemic of Covid-19 changed the everyday lives of many, both in the personal life and also workwise. As many organizations proceed to adapt into teleworking in a rapid change and therefore we were interested in the fact how managers in a more service minded sector had to adapt in their way of working. Going from meeting their colleagues everyday to only meet over media channels. As this leads us to our purpose to gain understanding how leaders make sense of how leadership differs from face-to-face. The main aspect of theories will lay the essays foundation in leadership, sensemaking and teleworking. Furthermore relations and communication plays a big part in the sensemaking process and our analysis. We found that the central change was found in the course of actions, while the fundamental reasoning remained.

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Analysts often work with large complex non-quantitative datasets in order to better understand concepts, themes, and other forms of insight contained within them. As defined by Pirolli and Card, this act of sensemaking is cognitively difficult, and is performed iteratively and repetitively through various stages of understanding. Immersive analytics has purported to assist with this process through putting users in virtual environments that allows them to sift through and explore data in three-dimensional interactive settings. Most previous research, however, has focused on quantitative data, where users are interacting with mostly numerical representations of data. We designed Immersive Space to Think, an immersive analytics approach to assist users perform the act of sensemaking with non-quantitative datasets, affording analysts the ability to manipulate data artifacts, annotate them, search through them, and present their findings. We performed several studies to understand and refine our approach and how it affects users sensemaking strategies. An exploratory virtual reality study found that users place documents in 2.5-dimensional structures, where we saw semicircular, environmental, and planar layouts. The environmental layout, in particular, used features of the environment as scaffolding for users' sensemaking process. In a study comparing levels of mixed reality as defined by Milgram-Kishino's Reality-Virtuality Continuum, we found that an augmented virtuality solution best fits users' preferences while still supporting external tools. Lastly, we explored how users deal with varying amounts of space and three-dimensional user interaction techniques in a comparative study comparing small virtual monitors, large virtual monitors, and a seated-version implementation of Immersive Space to Think. Our participants found IST best supported the task of sensemaking, with evidence that users leveraged spatial memory and utilized depth to denote additional meaning in the immersive condition. Overall, Immersive Space to Think affords an effective sensemaking three-dimensional space using 3D user interaction techniques that can leverage embodied cognition and spatial memory which aids the users understanding. / Doctor of Philosophy / Humans are constantly trying to make sense of the world around them. Whether they're a detective trying to understand what happened at a crime scene or a shopper trying to find the best office chair, people are consuming vast quantities of data to assist them with their choices. This process can be difficult, and people are often returning to various pieces of data repeatedly to remember why they are making the choice they decided upon. With the advent of cheap virtual reality products, researchers have pursued the technology as a way for people to better understand large sets of data. However, most mixed reality applications looking into this problem focus on numerical data, whereas a lot of the data people process is multimedia or text-based in nature. We designed and developed a mixed reality approach for analyzing this type of data called Immersive Space to Think. Our approach allows users to look at and move various documents around in a virtual environment, take notes or highlight those documents, search those documents, and create reports that summarize what they've learned. We also performed several studies to investigate and evolve our design. First, we ran a study in virtual reality to understand how users interact with documents using Immersive Space to Think. We found users arranging documents around themselves in a semicircular or flat plane pattern, or using various cues in the virtual environment as a way to organize the document set. Furthermore, we performed a study to understand user preferences with augmented and virtual reality. We found a mix of the two, also known as augmented virtuality, would best support user preferences and ability. Lastly, we ran two comparative studies to understand how three dimensional space and interaction affects user strategies. We ran a small user study looking at how a single student uses a desktop computer with a single display as well as immersive space to think to write essays. We found that they wrote essays with a better understanding of the source data with Immersive Space to Think than the desktop setup. We conducted a larger study where we compared a small virtual monitor simulating a traditional desktop screen, a large virtual monitor simulating a monitor 8 times the size of traditional desktop monitors, and immersive space to think. We found participants engaged with documents more in Immersive Space to Think, and used the space to denote importance for documents. Overall, Immersive Space to Think provides a compelling environment that assists users in understanding sets of documents.

When entrepreneurs interact and receive feedback they sort through and transform various subjective venture ideas into intersubjective venture concepts. This dissertation examines the dialogue of entrepreneurs in the nascent stages of opportunity development from a process theory approach to understand how entrepreneurs sort, navigate and make sense of ideas they encounter through feedback exchanges. Using conversational analysis, several conversation patterns are identified that shape the emergence process. Legitimacy associations, status quo assertions, experiential actualities, engagement hypotheticals, and deontic declarations contribute to the nonlinear opportunity emergence process. These discourse structures derived from speech acts are attended to, adopted, and implemented as they align with assessment filters of credibility, feasibility, desirability, and identity plausibility which are key elements of the opportunity interpretation process used during ideation and pivoting interactions. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation explores the very early stages of the entrepreneurship processes of ideation and opportunity development. Using speech acts theory and conversation analysis, I describe how entrepreneurs do things with words and how they navigate conversations with others about their idea. I identify different kinds of conversations that can be used to sort through confusing comments and flesh out ideas into venture concepts that make sense to the entrepreneur and those they get feedback from who help shape their ideas. I explain why entrepreneurs listen to some ideas and not others when trying to make sense of a possible pivot.

Display technology has developed significantly over the last decade, and it is becoming increasingly feasible to construct large, high-resolution displays. Prior work has shown a number of key performance advantages for these displays that can largely be attributed to the replacement of virtual navigation (e.g., panning and zooming) with physical navigation (e.g., moving, turning, glancing). This research moves beyond the question of performance or efficiency and examines ways in which the large, high-resolution display can support the cognitive demanding task of sensemaking. The core contribution of this work is to show that the physical properties of large, high- resolution displays create a fundamentally different environment from conventional displays, one that is inherently spatial, resulting in support for a greater range of embodied resources. To support this, we describe a series of studies that examined the process of sensemaking on one of these displays. These studies illustrate how the display becomes a cognitive partner of the the analyst, encouraging the use of the space for the externalization of the analyst's thought process or findings. We particularly highlight how the flexibility of the space sup- ports the use of incremental formalism, a process of gradually structuring information as understanding grows. Building on these observations, we have developed a new sensemaking environment called Analyst's Workspace (AW), which makes use of a large, high-resolution display as a core component of its design. The primary goal of AW is to provide an environment that unifies the activities of foraging and synthesis into a single investigative thread. AW addresses this goal through the use of an integrated spatial environment in which full text documents serve as primary sources of information, investigative tools for pursuing leads, and sensemaking artifacts that can be arranged in the space to encode information about relationships between events and entities. This work also provides a collection of design principles that fell out of the development of AW, and that we hope can guide future development of analytic tools on large, high-resolution displays. / Ph. D.

This dissertation studies how equal employment (EEO) programs changed ongoing personnel processes of a police organization. It uses an institutional approach of sensemaking, which treats personnel processes as interpretive systems to examine the effects of EEO on personnel processes and the idea of managing diversity. The research employs the case study methodology to examine personnel processes of the Pennsylvania State: Police (PSP) . This organization has operated under a federally monitored affirmative action decree since 1974. Findings confirm that EEO and affirmative action altered PSP personnel processes. Change was resisted, but nonetheless did occur slowly because of powerful and persistent constitutional/legal and political demands on the organization. This environment-organization interplay resulted in ideals of EEO and employment rights penetrating PSP personnel processes. In 1972 personnel processes reflected organizational characterizations to include unquestioned authority, seniority, and regimented structure, which clashed with EEO ideals. By 1993, EEO ideals of equality, equity, and fairness prevailed. The implementation of EEO policies provided for a more representative workforce in police organization. As more minorities and women enter the organization, the need to manage diversity arises. The data shows that managing diversity lacks the institutional imperative to bring about change to management and administrative behaviors as EEO did. If managing diversity becomes a desirable practice in the PSP, its institutions must incorporate its value of differences in light of EEO. This value would factor into setting goals, monitoring progress, and evaluating results of each employee. Theoretically, this practice would give the PSP the means to recognize differences when rewarding or remediating performance yet still honor constitutionally and politically mandated ideals of EEO. / Ph. D.

Learning from text data often involves a loop of tasks that iterate between foraging for information and synthesizing it in incremental hypotheses. Past research has shown the advantages of using spatial workspaces as a means for synthesizing information through externalizing hypotheses and creating spatial schemas. However, spatializing the entirety of datasets becomes prohibitive as the number of documents available to the analysts grows, particularly when only a small subset are relevant to the tasks at hand. To address this issue, we developed the multi-model semantic interaction (MSI) technique, which leverages user interactions to aid in the display layout (as was seen in previous semantic interaction work), forage for new, relevant documents as implied by the interactions, and then place them in context of the user's existing spatial layout. This results in the ability for the user to conduct both implicit queries and traditional explicit searches. A comparative user study of StarSPIRE discovered that while adding implicit querying did not impact the quality of the foraging, it enabled users to 1) synthesize more information than users with only explicit querying, 2) externalize more hypotheses, 3) complete more synthesis-related semantic interactions. Also, 18% of relevant documents were found by implicitly generated queries when given the option. StarSPIRE has also been integrated with web-based search engines, allowing users to work across vastly different levels of data scale to complete exploratory data analysis tasks (e.g. literature review, investigative journalism). The core contribution of this work is multi-model semantic interaction (MSI) for usable big data analytics. This work has expanded the understanding of how user interactions can be interpreted and mapped to underlying models to steer multiple algorithms simultaneously and at varying levels of data scale. This is represented in an extendable multi-model semantic interaction pipeline. The lessons learned from this dissertation work can be applied to other visual analytics systems, promoting direct manipulation of the data in context of the visualization rather than tweaking algorithmic parameters and creating usable and intuitive interfaces for big data analytics. / Ph. D.